Building a Robotic Colleague With Personality

Anxieties about whether machines will take our jobs will soon be a thing of the past. Robots are already here, adding new dimensions to the way we live and function, and researchers are exploring how to create intelligent machines that work better with us as opposed to taking our place. Guy Hoffman (@guyhoffman), assistant professor and Mills Family Faculty Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is studying how a working robot’s behavior can influence its human colleagues. The robots he designs lean forward to show they are listening to human interlocutors, and when they hear music, they nod in response to the beat. Hoffman’s work indicates that subtle changes in a robot’s actions have a positive effect on the humans around it. MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with him about his research to probe what his findings imply for managing human-robot teams.